So, I Was Talking With The Guy Who Owns An Lfs By Me....

[Sp00ky]

and he was giving me advice on getting my corys breeding again. he has plenty experience of this after breeding 16 gens of bronze and peppers.

So we started talking about guppys, and he said something very interesting to me, which i am unsure if its true or not.

He told me that females need to be seperated from the males by 12 weeks, otherwise they are no longer classed as virgins, for obvious reasons. He then made a rather strange comment which i dont really agree with. He stated that if this was not done, then the female would go through life pregnant without ever needing a male again. She would hold the sperm and fertilize only so many eggs at a time. Now i know that LB's can have multiple births going on at once, but surely she would not need to mate again for the rest of her life?

 

[dwarfgourami]

The figure usually quoted is "up to seven pregnancies". But it is also (I think) the case that females can hold onto sperm and not have the next batch when you expect it. But how this works out in practice, I really don't know. Or how long you estimate the lifetime of a female either. My elderly female guppy simply stopped having babies after a while. She's a real old wrinklie so I assumed it was age related. Other females I've had have stopped giving birth a certain number of months after separation from the male, but whether this had to happen and always happens- I really don't know.

Sorry this isn't really answering your question. Truth is, I don't really have any statistics on this.

The 12 weeks sounds right anyway.